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Justyna Dorsz

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Notes

Weekly Notes on the last day of the week

March 7, 2021

Last day of the week for me is Sunday. But apparently for a lot of people Sunday is the first day of the week. It’s so strange to think of Sunday as the first day. I’ve tried it for a few minutes — I actively wanted to convince myself that Sunday, not Monday, is the…

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Tagged With: Plan, Weekly Notes

How to get a $250 gift code from Threadless

March 6, 2021

I have a lot of designs and all of them are uploaded to my Artist Shop on Threadless, and sometimes I submit them to Threadless competitions. Every once in a while Threadless selects one of the designs to add to their main store and then they send me a $250 gift code. What do you…

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Tagged With: Threadless

The most incredible book you have never heard of

March 5, 2021

My favorite book of all time is “Little, Big” by John Crowley. I bet you haven’t heard of it. I have never met anyone who read it or even heard about it. And that’s crazy! The book is so weird and unique and amazing that it should be as popular as, say, “Game of Thrones”….

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Tagged With: Best, Books, Favorite, Little Big, Love Story

Flat Earth

March 4, 2021

Watch this video from a guy who used to believe that Earth was flat: He now knows that Earth is round but — he says so himself — he used to be completely sure that Earth was flat. It’s so weird how normal he seems. I thought that most people that claimed some strange stuff…

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Tagged With: Miscellaneous

Sabotage

March 3, 2021

Recently someone asked for opinions about their designs. But they insisted on receiving “positive feedback only”. What do you say to that? My standard response is, of course, to stay silent. If they haven’t asked for honest feedback, then it’s pointless to impose my opinion on them. But I can’t help feeling that they are…

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Tagged With: Mindset

Sales are worth it

March 2, 2021

Websites, where I sell my designs, run site-wide sales every few weeks. Everything is discounted, sometimes as much as 50%. I know some artists complain about it. When there’s no sale we earn around 25% of the price of an item. When there is a sale we get less, often as low as 10%. But…

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Tagged With: Graph, Money, Sales, Stats

My designs continue to surprise me

March 1, 2021

The image below shows my best-selling designs this past month. Not Today continues to be on top: Not Today Space Botanica Among Trees Inconceivably Vast Adequate Expression of Feelings Jump – that’s a surprise! Not Today (Black Variant) — remember to add inverted designs when it makes sense! Let’s Make Trouble — I did not…

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Tagged With: Income, List, TOP 10

Weekly Notes and the last day of February

February 28, 2021

All my days are so busy. I don’t know how other people do it, it seems everyone manages their time better than me. Lately, I’ve been constantly overwhelmed by how much work I have, by all those tasks on my to-do lists. It’s already the end of February and I haven’t even started on my…

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Tagged With: Plan, Weekly Notes

Uninterrupted work

February 27, 2021

What I like best is when I have a few hours of completely uninterrupted work, either programming or drawing. No emails, no phone calls, no Facebook. I just watched an interview with Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy author, and he says the same thing, but about writing. He says he likes to have two 4-hour long…

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Tagged With: Personal

Travis moment

February 26, 2021

Travis was a chimpanzee adopted by two people, Sandra and Jerome. They raised him and treated him as if he were their child. Travis lived at their home, ate at a table with the family, rode in their car, watched tv, helped around the house. What Travis did one day can’t be summarized better than…

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Tagged With: Personal

Don’t Panic

February 25, 2021

I see a lot of artists worried about low sales these past few weeks. Don’t panic! That’s completely normal this time of year. I’ve been a designer since 2012, and it has always been like that. February and March are just very, very slow months. Maybe this year is a bit slower than the previous…

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Tagged With: Advice, Artist Life, Threadless

I hired a law firm (Update #2)

February 24, 2021

One thing that’s been on my mind recently is this whole situation with illegal sellers. In December, I hired a lawyer and we sent requests to 19 people to stop selling my designs and pay me compensation. Recently, we’ve sent requests to 17 more people. But I’ve already found more. The most stolen one is:…

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Tagged With: Artist Life, Copyright, Law

Squarespace vs WordPress – The Costs

February 23, 2021

I manage two websites: This one, justynadorsz.com, which runs on WordPress and is hosted on DigitalOcean. A website about games that my brother and I made: manichyena.com — it’s hosted on Squarespace for now. I will be moving manichyena.com to WordPress in the upcoming days. The main reason is the financial one. Let’s look at…

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Tagged With: Squarespace, Website, WordPress

Store Maintenance CHECKLIST

February 22, 2021

I have a few stores with my designs. My main store is on Threadless but I also have my Teepublic store and a few smaller ones. I could leave them as they are and I would earn some passive income from them. But my stores would decline in popularity if I didn’t maintain them properly….

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Tagged With: Advice, Checklist

Featured Tee of the Day

February 21, 2021

Threadless featured my design “This is a disaster” 🙂 Here is the design.

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Tagged With: Cats, Design, Threadless

What do people buy?

February 20, 2021

I’ve written a lot about why you should open your own apparel store and sell your designs. But opening a store and uploading your art is just the first step. When I started, I rarely got any sales. Once or twice a month someone bought a t-shirt with my design. The more designs I uploaded,…

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Tagged With: Advice, Threadless

I keep drawing cats and putting them on t-shirts

February 19, 2021

If you are hesitating to start your own store because you “can’t draw”, then you should know that some of my designs are really not that complicated. Make a few sketches of your favorite animal and chances are that one of those sketches will be interesting enough to sell it on a t-shirt.

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Tagged With: Cats, Design

WordPress on DigitalOcean – Error establishing a database connection

February 18, 2021

Today this website wasn’t working for a few hours. My website is built with WordPress and is hosted on DigitalOcean. They were doing server maintenance — usually, that does not cause any issues but this time it did. When I tried to access my website, I got this error: I found out that the issue…

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Tagged With: DigitalOcean, Error, WordPress

February is the worst month and that’s okay

February 17, 2021

If you are a freelancer, your income is often unstable. When I was starting there have been months when I didn’t earn anything, and when I did earn something, it was less than $5 a month. Now, that I have a lot of designs in my online stores, I get regular royalty payments each month,…

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Tagged With: Artist Life

How funny are you?

February 16, 2021

Overall, funny t-shirts sell better. It’s not only my experience. Just recently I watched Michael Essek’s videos where he shares advice on designing and selling and marketing and he said pretty much the same thing. He said about 90% of his t-shirts are funny. It’s difficult to think of a funny design on the spot….

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Tagged With: Design, Design Advice

I doodled some leaves

February 15, 2021

I was sketching on my reMarkable while watching YouTube and I drew very simple leaves and then turned them into a design for apparel.

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Tagged With: Design, reMarkable

Disruptions

February 14, 2021

Joshua Waitzkin is a chess master, he wrote the book “The Art of Learning”. I was reminded about it today when my neighbors were listening to music too loudly. Joshua wrote that you are supposed to be able to concentrate even if something is distracting you. As an example: there was someone mowing the grass,…

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Tagged With: Personal

Forest Person – another variant

February 13, 2021

A few days ago I shared my Forest Person design: This is a black design on a grey background. But not everyone likes wearing light t-shirts. So I always try to invert colors and upload the design again, this time as a white design on a black background. However, when I inverted the colors, the…

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Tagged With: Design, Forest, reMarkable

My Top 10 Designs

February 12, 2021

I sorted my designs by how much money they’ve earned me so far. Some fun facts: My top 4 designs have cats! 8 out of 10 are black and white designs. I hesitated to send 5 of those 10 designs to Threadless and to my store. I thought no one would like them. And yet,…

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Tagged With: Cats, Design, List, Space, TOP 10

Attic — a little progress

February 11, 2021

Sharing a small update to the attic in our cat book 🙂

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Tagged With: Art, Attic, Cats, Our book, Work in progress

Making a children’s book – some notes

February 10, 2021

A few weeks ago, my brother and I started working on our first children’s book about cats. This is a good time to write a bit about the process and why we decided on this project. From the start it was a challenge: Both my brother and I are artists, but we make designs for…

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Tagged With: Advice, Mindset, Money, Our book

ReMarkable Cat

February 9, 2021

All my days are spent sketching on reMarkable or working on our cat book. I am also searching for a new apartment. This cat is another minimal sketch I made using reMarkable 2.

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Tagged With: Cats, Design, reMarkable

Our Cat Book: Attic

February 8, 2021

Working on the attic today. This is just an initial sketch. No cats yet. See also: Kitchen Bedroom Library #1 and #2

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Tagged With: Art, Attic, Our book, Work in progress

If you want to do more sketches…

February 7, 2021

I think reMarkable 2 is one of the most useful things I bought. I always keep it next to my keyboard and whenever I take a break from work, I start sketching in it. Sometimes all I manage to create are some silly drawings but every now and then I make something good and can…

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Tagged With: Birds, Design, reMarkable, Sketch

One more reason to sell your art on Threadless

February 6, 2021

It’s not a secret that I like Threadless. They are my favorite company, you can earn a lot of money, and there are even more perks. I’ve just noticed that for the entire month of March Threadless runs an additional promotion for artists. For every regular t-shirt sold in your Artist Shop, you get double…

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Tagged With: Advice, Threadless

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Every few weeks I write an email newsletter about design, passive income, and other things worth sharing.

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